A vividly written, memorable series of profiles in courage and fierce resistance.
Affecting portraits of Ukrainians caught up in a war whose origins trace back centuries.
A historian who grew up partly in Ukraine, Leavitt writes of the country’s lifeways: “the smart and dark sense of humor, minor-key folk songs, old women selling lingerie in underground walkways, how people regard long walks as a primary form of entertainment.” But, she notes, most people outside the country recognize only one Ukrainian by sight or name, Volodymyr Zelensky. Aiming to correct this, Leavitt focuses on ordinary Ukrainians across the country and their experiences in war. One, Vitaly, owns a struggling coffee shop near Kyiv, making most of his living recycling; another, Tania, lives on a pig farm in a Russian-occupied part of southern Ukraine and has taken to calling the invaders orcs, “invoking the grotesque, nonhuman characters from Lord of the Rings,” or “rashist,” “a mix of the words ‘Russian’ and ‘fascist’”; yet another, Maria, is caught in the hellish bombardment of the eastern city of Mariupol until being evacuated to a far-western town where few speak her native Russian, a language “still perceived as an outsider tongue.” Apart from offering memorable portraits of her dramatis personae, each of whom copes in one way or another with all the hardships of war and occupation, Leavitt serves up fascinating observations befitting a top-tier ethnography. One track she follows, thanks to Vitaly the recycler and a publisher named Volodymyr, are the changing reading tastes of the Ukrainian public: “In the 1990s, everyone was throwing away Soviet books, manuals, pamphlets, propaganda….In the fall of 2022…Vitaly hauled away vans full of books by anyone who was Russian or represented Russia, even if they had never said anything about Ukraine.” Elsewhere she offers helpful explanations of why, despite Russia’s imperial ambitions, Ukraine truly is a separate nation—and why it behooves the West to defend it.
A vividly written, memorable series of profiles in courage and fierce resistance.Pub Date: May 20, 2025
ISBN: 9780374614331
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
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